Romney Victory Inc.: Another Weird Disclosure Twist

By now, we should have a complete picture of what the presidential candidates and political party committees raised and spent through the end of April. Regular monthly campaign finance reports for these committees were due last Sunday.

But wait. One committee isn’t following the monthly pattern, causing confusion in the way the April numbers have been reported. Romney Victory Inc. — a committee raising funds for Mitt Romney‘s campaign, three national Republican party committees and several state GOPs — registered with the FEC on April 5 but has announced that it will be filing quarterly reports.

That means we won’t see its first report until July 15.

Joint fundraising committees are standard practice these days once a party’s nominee is known. They allow donors to give the maximum amount possible to the candidate ($5,000 per election cycle) and the national party (a hefty $30,800 per year) and state parties (up to $10,000 per year per state) in one fell swoop.

President Barack Obama‘s reelection campaign has been using one of these (Obama Victory Fund 2012) for more than a year and regularly claims credit for the substantial sums raised for the Democratic National Committee and documented in monthly reports to the FEC.

But since Romney Victory didn’t file a monthly report, there’s nothing on the public record to indicate how much it has raised or spent. Presumably it has raised about $18 million, taking a global number announced by Romney’s campaign and subtracting what could be documented in the most recent reports.

Romney Victory Inc. won’t be able to hide the ball very long (if that’s even the objective). Once it distributes funds to the campaign and/or parties, those committees will disclose that money (and the original donors) in their normal monthly reports. We’ll start to see this money reported either June 20 or July 15.

It does beg the question, though — how is it possible that a joint fundraising committee that is authorized by a presidential candidate and affiliated with national party committees, all of which are required to file monthly (just one of the several state GOPs that will benefit from the fund is a quarterly filer) doesn’t also have a monthly filing requirement?

This is yet another small example of the complexity of the process and the FEC’s approach to this kind of question. There are clear rules written into the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act about the reporting requirements for certain kinds of committees (in this case presidential campaigns and parties) but a joint fundraising committee isn’t necessarily either one of those. It’s common for the agency to err on the side of flexibility in these situations, effectively allowing the committee to choose its own reporting schedule. But it does seem inconsistent with at least the spirit of BCRA’s quicker disclosure requirements.

Prior to joining the Center in 2011, Bob spent thirty years on the Staff of the U.S. Federal Election Commission, developing and promoting disclosure. He has served as the Commission's Statistician, its Press Officer, and as a special assistant working to redesign the disclosure process. A graduate of Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Bob has written extensively on campaign finance, political parties, and interest groups, and is co-editor of After the Revolution: PACs Lobbies, and the Republican Congress, and Risky Business?: PAC Decision-making in Congressional Elections. You can follow Bob on Twitter at @rbiersack

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